Amygdala

Unfitness is a lot like fitness; you really have to work at it. With fitness, you struggle and pant and sweat for weeks without losing weight or getting any faster and then suddenly, the next run you do doubles your stamina. You lift a few more weights and those weird veins pop out of your biceps when you’re asleep. From then on, you just get fitter and fitter.

Well I find unfitness works the same way. You start eating a Kingsize Mars bar with your sausage sandwich and not much happens. You drink four pints a night instead of two and while the additional pissing disrupts your sleep, you motor on pretty much as is. You switch to Marlboro reds and full strength Coke and you don’t even cough more. This goes on for months. Then, one day, you’re on the escalator at Bank. You have to get away from the talentless cunt who thinks that a poor imitation of Hendrix is an appropriate hymn to the dawn so you decide to nip up the left hand side. Suddenly, right there, all that work you’ve done to get unfit pays off, all at once, a long way from the top.

From then on, every mouthful bursts another button. Every fag frees a litre of phlegm. Every beer marbles your liver with another tendril of fat. You’re a miracle. You’ve overcome the biological determination of your body to stay strong and survive. You’ve subverted millions of years of evolution and become a seal. And it’s an achievement. It’s as hard to turn your body into lard as it is to get it to run for 40 minutes. And if you’re young you deserve a medal. Like a necrotising virus you’ve turned lean, hard muscle into slippery decay. You’ve invented auto-lipoflation.

So let’s get off the backs of the morbidly obese. They’re doing something special and we couldn’t do it. And anyway, they can’t carry us any more.